The present invention relates in general to telecommunications, and in particular, to facsimile transmissions over a network.
The use of facsimile (xe2x80x9cfaxxe2x80x9d) transmissions has become such an important part of doing business that it is a wonder commerce was ever able to do without fax machines. The ever evolving and growing world economy requires the fax machine to transmit documents around the world. There is a need to further increase the speed of fax transmissions. The speed at which documents can be sent by a facsimile transmission is limited by two main factors:
(1) the speed at which a fax machine can scan in a document, and
(2) the speed at which the facsimile transmission can be transferred over the public switched telephone network (xe2x80x9cPSTNxe2x80x9d).
Increasing the speed of either of these two factors would be very desirable, especially in those instances where a large number of pages are being faxed at any one time. One means of increasing the speed is direct faxing from a desktop computer. This significantly speeds the process by eliminating the need to scan the document. However, the transmission of the document to the remote fax machine is still limited by the transmission speed.
Therefore, there remains a need for more quickly transmitting faxes over the PSTN.
The foregoing need is addressed by the present invention, which provides a high-speed fax machine for transmitting documents at faster transmission rates when both the sending and receiving fax transmission devices are connected to a PSTN with higher speed connections, such as ISDN or ATM (asynchronous transfer mode). A functionality is provided by the present invention whereby the fax transmission device, which is connected to the PSTN by the higher speed connection, determines whether the remote fax transmission device is also connected to the PSTN by a higher speed connection. If such a determination is made, then the fax transmission is made at the higher transmission speed provided by the high speed connections. Such a higher transmission rate may result in a direct digital transmission between the two fax devices.
The present invention is not limited to the application of fax devices, but may be applied to any telecommunications device transmitting information over a network.